Readers' comments

Hi,
A walk in the park. Putin it mildly, just “Follow the Moskwa Down to Gorky Park”. Protest in Russia has no chance without access to internet. The size of the land, censored infrastructure as hampering factor can be avoided by simple satellite internet access.

Something is fundamentally wrong with Putin's 'United Russia' party.
Just a couple of weeks after Putin has been officially sworn in as President, one of his trusted supporters, Vasily Yakemenko, the founder of the pro-Kremlin "Nashi", announced plans to create a new political party designed to attract the young, disaffected, middle-class voters. Vasily, who has already chosen to name his new creation the "Party of Power", said he will be ready to field candidates for municipal elections this fall.

Yakemenko is all in favour of “creative or middle-class” people aged 25 to 35, who “have their own opinions”. Well, that cannot include Putin's comrades-in-arms who are well above that narrow age bracket. Yakemenko was clear that “the generation whose thinking remains weighed down with ideas from Soviet times must be squeezed out of the ruling elite”.
Good thinking except that Russian ruling elite, starting with Vlad Putin, is full of ideas from Soviet times. Maybe he should be replaced by Yakemenko ?

Didomyk: “...the number who live in the Russian Federation, having been sent there unwillingly by their Soviet masters,”

……….
Dido you do not have a case - labour mobility. Yes committed by Soviet masters but with Ukrainian flavour. Was not Crimea gifted to Ukraine by those same masters? Even Zakarpattia was part of Czechoslovakia and taken away by Ukraine. Tell me about Eastern Ukraine!

I agree with Kuzmich when he says: “Udaltsov is a pro-communist leader favorite of Zyuganov who reminds me of Volodya Ulyanov. Czarist okhranka never took Volodya Ulyanov (Lenin) seriously who later dragged Russia into communist chaos.”

Now that's a new one, even for you - "labour mobility". Indeed Stalin's trusted partner in crime Lazar Kaganovich significantly increased Soviet "labour mobility" by deporting millions of unrully Ukrainian peasants ('kulaks') due to their resistance to collectivisation. And the NKVD Chief Yezhov improved 'labour mobility' in late 1930s by deporting and/or executing tens of thousands for such typical sins as being an 'imperialist spy', 'enemy of the people', "counterrevolutionary', etc. And his successor and Stalin's friend Beria made his major contribution to the Soviet 'labour mobility' by sending to Gulags hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tartars, Chechens and others as well as millions of Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, German, Italian, Japanese and other POWs. Oh, and lets not forget the 'labour mobility' of hundreds of thousands of former Red army soldiers returning from captivity in 1945 who had to be "re-educated" working in Siberian mines, building the Trans-Siberian railway and similar tasks. Indeed, for a great majority of all these people their "mobility" ended somewhere in unmarked graves. There were many others 'labour mobility' schemes too numerous to mention.

NO, NO correrection. Lazar Kaganovich was a Russified Jew, a 'junior' partner in crime of the Jewish Commissar Leon Trotsky and a 'brother in arms' of such other Jewish commissars as Genrikh Yagoda who headed the Soviet secret police.

You should read Solzhenitsyn who described how Yagoda's black vans roamed the streets of St. Petersburg, known then as Leningrad, to round up "class enemies" such as former Russian aristocracts, civil servants, former professionals, anyone who did not fit the 'revolutionary' image. That was also a part of your infamous 'labour mobility'!
As to Joe or Soso Yugashvili, well he obviously liked to have Jewish wifes, didn't he ? Maybe you can explain why ? So did other Politbureau members like Molotov, who signed the August 1939 deal with Ribbentrop ! How about Karl Marx himself, the father of marxism ?

Seven838
Seems like due to Putin-decreed 'labour mobility' you must have been re-assigned to another 'labour-mobility' task where you are prohibited from commenting on the racial-ethnic origins of Stalin's wifes or for that matter on the origin of such Stalin's faithful 'emissaries' as Rudolf Slansky, Jacub Berman, Roman Zambrowski (Nussbaum), Jacek Rozanski (Goldberg), Anna Pauker, and thousands of others. That's not to mention your obvious resistance to even mentioning a rather long list of names of Putin's contemporaries who, for some reason known only to the Kremlin insiders, prefer to keep their wealth out of Putin's reach.

Putin's support for right wing nationalistic policies in what is supposed to be a multinational Russian Federation has now reached the stage of a judicial ban of all cultural and educational activities of one of the most prominent minorities in Russia. Today the Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry has released an official statement highly critical of the Russian Court's decision to disband the "Union of Ukrainians in Russia" pointing out that a political nature of this decision underlines an obvious bias against Ukrainians, citizens of the Russian Federation. The Ukrainian Ministry's statement confirmed that
'....we support a just desire of the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia, - one of the largest ethnic communities in the Russian Federation, - to have an influencial and effective Ukrainian civic organisation of an all-Federation status that would contribute to a further development of Ukrainian-Russian cultural and humanitarian relations."
More on the MFA commentary (in Ukrainian) here:http://www.unian.ua/news/504285-mzs-zvinuvativ-rosiyu-v-uperedjenomu-sta...

An interview with the leader of the now banned 'Union of Ukrainians in Russia', a prominent academic and Director of a Medical Institute in Moscow Dr. Taras Dudko, here (in Ukrainian):

"Foreign Ministry of Ukraine considers the decision of the Supreme Court of Russia on liquidation of the public organization "the Union of Ukrainians of Russia as biased, says the statement, published on the official website.

"Unfortunately, the Court ignored the work of new leadership of the Union aimed at improvement of flaws, revealed during inspections. Such decision has proved biased attitude to the activity of Ukrainian Diaspora. We believe such approach conflicts with the traditionally friendly relations between our people,".

"The Supreme Court of Russia has sustained the lawsuit of the Russian Justice Ministry on liquidation of the Union of Ukrainians of Russia. The decision was announced by the Supreme Court Judge Nikolai Romenenko.

"Having listened to the explanations of the Justice Ministry and the Union, having studied the materials of the case and having listened to the debates, the Supreme Court decides to sustain the appeal of the Justice Ministry and to liquidate the public organization the Union of Ukrainians of Russia, excluding it from the list of legal entities," Romenenko said.

"The Union of Ukrainians of Russia (UUR) does not agree to a decision of the Russian Supreme Court about closing of the organization and are planning to appeal it."

“We do not agree to a single accusation of the Justice Ministry. We intend to file a cassation to the Supreme Court Collegium,”.

As reported earlier, today the Supreme Court of Russia took a decision about liquidation of the Union of Ukrainians of Russia and exclusion it from the 'Unified State Register of Legal Entities'.

This is the second Ukrainian organization closed in Russia. On January 27, 2011, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation took a decision about liquidation of the Federal National-Cultural Autonomy of Ukrainians of Russia.

How would Putin and his 'United Russia' party react to any court imposed closures of any Russian cultural or information organisation in any Western country ? The answer is obvious.

Déjà vu. More than 80 years ago, workers were gathering in the woods for picnics leaving garbage everywhere counseling each other. In Russian counsel is SOVIET. The events happened then were in May called May-ovki Soon after those Bolsheviks took over and ruled for over 70 years without anybody’s Soviet. Udaltsov is a pro-communist leader favorite of Zyuganov who reminds me of Volodya Ulyanov. Czarist okhranka never took Volodya Ulyanov (Lenin) seriously who later dragged Russia into communist chaos.

kuzmich, you said " Bolsheviks took over and ruled for over 70 years without anybody’s Soviet."
Wait a moment. Wasn't EVERYTHING Soviet ? Start with 'Sovietskaya vlast', 'Soyuz Sovietskikh..', 'Verkhovnyi Soviet', etc. etc. There was enough of this 'Soviet' nonsense to last a millenium !

Now as to Volodya Ulyanov, its a long story. At least some of his misdeeds can be traced to a stormy personality of his great-grandfather, Moshko Itsikovich Blank and his great-grandmother Miriam Froimovich, both of traditional Jewish families residing in Starokonstantinov, a town in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, later occupied by the Russian Tsar. The Jewish elders of the town, known as the kahal, regarded Moshko Blank as a thug who retailed vodka to residents and visitors alike, cheated his customers, violated Passover customs and even dared to blackmail the kahal before Russian authorities starting with the town administration, the provincial (gubernia) Russian governor and eventually complaining to the Tsar himself.

Eventually, Moshko Blank decided that enough was enough, erased his own and his surviving children's Jewish links to the past by accepting Russian Orthodoxy and renaming his son Able as Dmitrii, daughter Liba as Liubov and Yisroel as Alexander. Czarist okhranka obviously knew all that and took Volodya Ulyanov as an Empire loyalist.
Some decades later the Kremlin Politbureau ordered a systematic purge of all pre-revolutionary archives in Ukraine and Russia to eliminate any and all traces of Vladimir Lenin's blood relationship to Moshko Itsikovich Blank of Starokonstantinov. By that time Volodya Ulyanov had assumed his new revolutionary identity.

For Russia this kind of protest never existed before. Russian are the same as people in most countries especially in the western capitalistic countries, where citizens are used to make their voices heard in political issues concerning their vested interests. However, as a citizen in the biggest communistic country, we Chinese are accustmoned to this kind of protest. We also have the legislation for civil demonstrations stating what citizens can do to exert their entitled political rights, but the truth is we seldom protest with radical slogans or an straight claims.

Such phenomon dosen't result from political matters only, it has something to do with our cultures too. For the priciple of golden mean persists in many apect of social life, especially in the relationship bewteen populace and the authority.

Yavlinsky says that the middle-class opposition has to get elected to be deemed serious? What a hutzpah, really! He himself barely made it to the Parliament, and is a political non-entity for quite a long time.

The latest method of preventing Russian opposition from staging walks in Moscow's parks and squares is to charge them with damage to landscaping. That's what an 'independent' court has just done. After the police has estimated the damages at $650,000 few people would want to be seen in that park again.

Somebody among the Russian opposition most certainly had the talent and imagination to foresee how Putin and Medvedev would look like after having been "re-elected" as president well into the 2040s and 2050s. Take a good look:

It sounds like an execrise in trapping the government by incrementalism.

It is silly to arrest people for just walking around. But suppose they are wearing symbolic ribbons? How about singing protest songs? It becomes an exercise in figuring out where to draw the line without looking really silly.

The problem is, the only really viable place to draw the line is if major disruption of traffic or violence occurs. And if you hang back that long, you are stuck with pictures of large numbers of citizens demonstrating their dislike for you and your works. Which Putin is not going to be happy with either.